MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : US & ISRAEL – They allege that Israeli security forces taught US police how to put down protests and use chokeholds.
Fact vs. fiction on US-Israel police exchanges
Al-Monitor spoke to Israelis and Americans involved in police exchanges between the countries in response to far-left allegations they teach harmful practices. Police remove protesters blocking a main road during a demonstration against the Israeli government near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, Aug. 16, 2020.
Adam Lucente Aug 24, 2020 – AL MONITOR – Black Lives Matter protests and some left and anti-Israel groups are calling for an end to police training exchanges between US and Israeli police, prompting participants in such programs to speak out.
Since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May, media outlets and pro-Palestine organizations have sought to connect controversial restraint, crowd control and other tactics utilized by US police to Israel. They allege that Israeli security forces taught US police how to put down protests and use chokeholds.
The idea that long-standing concerns about systemic racism and controversial US police practices could be linked to Israeli training programs is questionable. But the allegations gained some traction on the left and that has produced a strong counter-reaction from police.
The London-based news outlet Middle East Eye ran several articles comparing US police’s actions in Minneapolis to Israeli security forces’ against the Palestinians. One Palestinian in Minneapolis told the outlet that the tear gas used against the protesters in the city reminded him of Palestine. Another article included photos showing Israeli soldiers kneeling on the necks of Palestinian suspects in a way that mirrored former officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd.
Some American anti-police activists want to shut down US-Israel police exchanges. Demilitarize From Atlanta 2 Palestine works to end the Atlanta Police Department’s relationship with the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE).
GILEE organizes meetings between US police departments and police around the world. During a Zoom event in late July, Demilitarize From Atlanta 2 Palestine claimed that GILEE, which includes Israeli police among its exchange partners, teaches “some of the most violent policies, behaviors, and tactics of the state” and “mass surveillance, policing, incarceration.”
Criticisms of US-Israel police relations are not new. In 2016, Amnesty International published an article noting that police in Baltimore — where a Black man named Freddie Gray died after being arrested in 2015 — trained in Israel. The leading human rights organization did not include evidence of what Baltimore police learned there.
Israelis have learned about policing in the United States as well during GILEE’s exchanges.
“Israelis — like all visitors who have centralized government — feel challenged to understand the idea and practice of home rule and the power of local government,” Cummings noted.
David Weisburd teaches criminology at George Mason University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A recent article he co-wrote analyzed Israel’s EMUN program, which was based on the principle of problem-oriented policing. This is a crime reduction strategy that seeks to identify and solve problems in a community as a means of fighting crime.
EMUN was a nationwide program in Israel that followed earlier problem-oriented policing models in New York and Australia.
The Israel police is the civilian police force for all of Israel. The United States, with its thousands of separate police departments, is a world innovator in policing in a way that is hard to match in Israel’s centralized police, according to Weisburd.
“The US has 15,000-20,000 separate police departments and they operate independently to a great degree,” Weisburd told Al-Monitor. “There’s tremendous innovation. It’s hard in systems like Israel where you have a single system.”
The fatal shooting of Iyad Hallak offers a clear parallel between policing issues in both countries. Hallak, an unarmed autistic Palestinian from Jerusalem, was shot and killed by Israeli border police in May. The police mistakenly thought he had a weapon. The incident led to outrage and inspired Palestinian Lives Matter protests in Israel.
Israel’s border police shot Hallak. This force operates in Jerusalem and the West Bank in addition to Israel’s borders. The unit is known for having many Druze officers and has participated in some US-Israel police exchanges.
“There’s been more criticism of the border police,” Weisburd added. He said there are notable differences to consider when comparing Israeli and American police; rate of gun violence is much higher in the United States than in Israel.
“America is a society where there’s tremendous violence,” he said. “Look at the number of Israelis who have been in the custody of the police and died. It’s a very small number compared to the US.”
Critical reports on US-Israel police exchanges also shed some light on the relationship. The pro-BDS group Jewish Voice for Peace published an in-depth report titled “Deadly Exchange” on US-Israel police ties in 2018, but some of their findings are disputed.
The report said that the Atlanta Police Department based its Video Integration Center on the elaborate system of cameras in the Old City of Jerusalem, citing a news article. An Atlanta Police Department spokesperson denied this.
“Our Video Integration unit is not modeled after police station cameras in Jerusalem,” officer Anthony Grant told Al-Monitor.
A 2015 report from the department touted its recent exchanges with Israeli police, but did not credit Israel for establishing the Video Integration Center in the section on the center’s progress.
The report also said the New York Police Department (NYPD) established a surveillance program for Muslim New Yorkers based on Israeli intelligence gathering in the West Bank.
The Associated Press conducted extensive research on this in 2011. One of the articles cited a former police official saying the program was based in part on Israeli operations in the West Bank. The outlet also reported that the CIA was heavily involved in helping the NYPD with intelligence gathering following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Jewish Voice for Peace also said that the NYPD’s Ring of Steel surveillance network is related to Israel’s surveillance systems. A New York Daily News article cited by Jewish Voice for Peace said that in 2013, Israel’s then-Police Chief Yochanan Danino visited the NYPD to learn from New York police officers about community relations, discuss counterterrorism and tour the Ring of Steel. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union said that the Ring of Steel is based on a system in London.
On crowd control, Jewish Voice for Peace cited a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting that included a quote from a US police officer saying he learned crowd control techniques from Israeli forces on a 2013 trip.